I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to electronics, and more specifically to techniques for performing scissoring for graphics applications.
II. Background
Graphics processing units (GPUs) are specialized hardware units used to render 2-dimensional (2-D) and 3-dimensional (3-D) images for various applications such as video games, graphics, computer-aided design (CAD), simulation and visualization tools, imaging, etc. A GPU may perform various graphics operations such as shading, blending, etc. to render a drawing or image. These graphics operations may be computationally intensive. To reduce computation, the drawing may be clipped to the bounds of the drawing surface. The drawing may further be clipped to the interior of one or more scissoring regions. Each scissoring region may describe a specific section of the drawing surface to retain. The portions of the drawing that are clipped may be discarded and hence not rendered. Improved performance may be achieved by omitting computation for the discarded portions of the drawing.
Scissoring refers to a process of clipping a drawing or image with one or more scissoring regions. A GPU may perform scissoring in order to save computation for portions of the drawing that do not need to be rendered. However, processing and memory resources are consumed in order to perform scissoring. The amount of resources used for scissoring may increase with the number of scissoring regions.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to efficiently perform scissoring.